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Using Alexa to Find Your Target Audience

1/19/2013

6 Comments

 
Even when a writer has determined the likely target audience for their book, they sometimes have problems figuring out where that target audience hangs out. Let me share a promotion tip with you that may help you figure this out.

Alexa is a search engine that can help writers locate those websites most frequently visited by their target audience. For example, let’s suppose you have written a book with a subject matter that will be mostly of interest to women 50 years or older. Then you hear about this very popular site called Wattpad that connects readers with writers all over the world. Should you spend your time promoting your book on Wattpad? If you copy the URL for Wattpad and paste it into the search box at the top of the Alexa page and click “search,” Alexa will give you an analysis of this site.

On the page you will find these options: Traffic Stats, Search Analytics, Audience, Contact Info, Reviews, Related Links, and Clickstream. Click on the tab that says “Audience.” Alexa will display a page that will break down the audience that visits Wattpad using several parameters.
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You can see that Wattpad is mostly frequented by women. However, among the visitors the 18-24 years old range is overrepresented with respect to the general population. So Wattpad may not be the ideal place to promote this book. But let’s repeat the above process for another site called LibraryThing.
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Here we see that among the group of people that visit this website, women in the 45 to 65 year old group is overrepresented compared to the general population. Therefore this may be a more logical site to promote the book.

Alexa also gives you additional information such as the popularity of the website (global traffic rank), the rank in the U.S. and the site’s reputation (the number of sites linking to the website). If you are willing to install the free Alexa tool bar in your computer you can get access to even more information like the ethnicity and income of the population visiting a site.

Please note that the above is a rather simplistic analysis and there are several other things to take into account before you decide to devote your valuable time to promoting your book on a website, but Alexa may be a good starting point that will help you optimize your efforts. Go to the Alexa site and play around with it a little analyzing several websites that you are using or plan to use for promotion of your book, and leave a comment here and let us know of your results or any questions you may have.


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6 Comments
Barbara Alfaro link
1/19/2013 01:30:09 am

Thanks for this excellent analysis. Quite awhile ago, I did find out that Wattpad is for younger readers. Didn't know about Library Thing and am definitely going to look into it.

Reply
Rolando link
1/19/2013 01:00:29 pm

Thanks for your comment Barbara. It's is not enough for a writer to find the target audience for their book (which is already hard), they also have to figure out where said audience is. With tools like Alexa we can begin to achieve this.

Reply
A.K.Andrew link
1/22/2013 05:27:03 am

Really useful post Rolando. I have to confess I haven't paid much attention to Alexa. But this has shown me how useful it could be. Thanks also for the heads up on the two sites you mention. Great links for writers :-)

Reply
Rolando link
1/22/2013 09:04:33 am

Thanks for your comment, I hope it's useful to you! : ^ )

Reply
Jeri link
1/23/2013 12:54:09 pm

Alexa definitely offers some helpful insights. The search terms associated with my blog still aren't quite where I want them yet, but I did remove my travel posts in order to get a better sense of what traffic comes my way. I also like how you van enter a few sites at once in order to see how they compare.

Reply
Rolando link
1/25/2013 06:27:40 am

Thanks for your comment Jeri. I think it's a great tool to help you determine where to concentrate your promotional efforts.

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